Ascii Dreams

Sunday, 16 July 2017

Michael Brough has just released an expansion to 868-HACK called PLAN.B and it's available on Steam as DLC and iOS as an in app purchase. Much like his recent Ossuary expansion to Imbroglio, I consider it pretty essential but for different reasons. Ossuary made the early game more interesting by allowing for a much greater variety of deck builds which were not necessarily game winning but were a lot more fun to play. This was great for a player like myself who wasn't likely to get to the end game but was looking for a fulfilling experience.

PLAN.B is instead for players with deep understanding of 868-HACK and who are looking for increased difficulty at the start, but more competitive long term play. Luckily, I also fall into this category so both releases have hit the sweet spot for my game skill. PLAN.B makes the game more difficult by having the deceptively named power ups occur from game one instead of appearing only after a few streak games. But at the same time it adds 8 new programs to give you more control. The cumulative effect is that while I feel like each run is harder (even just to survive) I've ended up playing longer streaks.

The new abilities are good but not essential (with the exception of .QUIT which is situational but vital given the power up changes) but they do a good job of filling the middle ground between a bad build and a good build in part by decreasing the overall likelihood of finding the 'perfect combination' and partly by adding cheap and useful ways of killing things (and I have no idea what .SAVE does but I'm okay with that). All but one, .CULL which is situational and expensive and while it has synergies, they're also expensive. I haven't tested .ICE/.CULL but that would make this useful if it works (and be the kind of enemy clamping, screen clearing ability that the name suggests it should be).

Of course, this wouldn't be a 'I love MichaelBrough's game' blog post without me trying to backseat design :)

(My urge to back seat design is worse than this post appears. I had written a longer post exploring two additional abilities, but ultimately that felt incredibly self indulgent).

I'm less sure PLAN.B is worth getting if you bounced on the original game, but if you managed at least a single streak score then this expansion is going to be a must have. The power ups fix many of the issues that single game score chasing scored by ramping up the difficulty enough to make high score chasing unpleasant and much more unpredictable and reducing the surprise of suddenly finding power ups affecting how you played (much in the same way that the jungle in Spelunky throws a difficulty curve ball).

Tuesday, 31 January 2017

I would like to announce that Unangband 0.6.5c has been released by the new Unangband maintainer DGoldDragon28. DGoldDragon28 had been developing a variant based on Unangband, and now has my blessing to continue with the main Unangband releases as well.

Sunday, 20 November 2016

I started recording the latest Roguelike Radio podcast (on Imbroglio) at 4:40 am in order to accomodate both UK and US based guests which is why I have such a slow start to the show.

One point I touched on is how Imbroglio has the ingredients of a roguelike with a very different set of outcomes, which justifies Michael Brough's labelling of it as 'roguelike?'. This missing piece is close to the tactics versus strategy debate but it doesn't fall on the same axis. It's also close to a puzzle form but it isn't just procedural puzzle solving. I'd like to label it "improvisation" because it feels very much like improvisation (in theatre) or how I imagine musical improvisation plays out. Imbroglio has improvisation, but the core design discourages it in some of the ways we talked about (at the level I'm playing at).

I don't think I've seen anyone write clearly about improvisation in depth in the context of game play (Feel free to point me to articles I may have missed) except perhaps relating to Far Cry 2. More significantly, I'm not sure if there are games which have improvisation as their primary mechanic (Spelunky?) and I'd be interested in hearing about whether there are any games which do so.

Tuesday, 11 October 2016

1. Remove the --src-specials option from the Build options.
2. Add the following 2 lines as early as you can in your document:
"\usepackage{luatex85}\def\pgfsysdriver{pgfsys-pdftex.def}"
3. Font paths don't appear to be supported in Windows. Instead copy the fonts into the fonts directory.

Friday, 16 September 2016

I've been a little hesitant about talking about the design work going into the High Frontier RPG since the arguments of the politest naysayers to my first post about it can be approximated by "I haven't been to Russia so it can't exist." There are far less polite responses on the High Frontier board game mailing list, so I appreciate the general tone of the arguments being made in the comments - I'm just not swayed by them because among other things, they miss the fundamental fact that the person whose post I linked to is not just a hysterical tumblr user, but someone who has actually won a landmark precedent setting court case on the exact thing I was talking about.

Nonetheless, I'm also feeling guilty about a throwaway line I made in the last design post, which I think needs clarification and expansion on:

"Unlike virtually every other RPG on the market (sans Microscope), High Frontier RPG does not have a fixed game world"

This is, of course, nonsense as every single game master can attest to - the game world evolves as soon as players being to interact with it. The caveat I should have added at the time was "unlike virtually every other published setting on the market" and even then that is insufficient, as much like comics, RPG settings have to be torn asunder and rewritten to account for inevitable power creep and conflicts in the stories set in them.

What I meant, is that the published setting for the High Frontier RPG consists of very few immutable rules: nuclear power in space, wet extra planetary locations, a new space race, and even then there's potential caveats and loop holes that may mean not even these are true - for instance, the data used to predict icy comets and Ceres, a frozen Mars and water in the clouds of Venus has turned out to be inaccurate but High Frontier relies so much on these places having useful amounts of water to keep the game balanced and interesting that it'd be a different game if these changes were made.

The rest of the High Frontier RPG universe is not fixed: its random and chaotic and procedurally generated from the players actions directly (you can go out and set up factories and colonies yourself to increase the tech level you have available) and indirectly (the chosen Space Politics will directly impact how the social, political and technological milieu of the game evolves). Even then, I'm only attempting to stuff 60 years into the rules (the average time simulated by a High Frontier board game) and borrowing heavily from all sorts of science fiction tropes to try to guide what this looks like.

At the heart of this system is trends: a trend determines what the next few impacts on the crew are - be it a technology they can begin using, or a change to the way they operate or the missions they get, or a new type of human they are forced to evolve into or are replaced by. I split the trends up into ones driven by Mission Control, ones driven by the political environment that Mission control works in, and wider social trends representing what long term trends are happening Earthside (as distinct from short term events).

I'm going to quote from one person's experience of messing around with the trend system rather than an actual game session, to give you a feel for what this might play like:

I generated the equivalent of Luftwaffe-in-Space: Red MCSU - Crew Nationality German. Not sure how to determine starting politics (always Purple?), but I simply rolled for it at the beginning and started on Red as well.

In a fairly small number of turns:

-Zipped out to Ceres with a VASIMR-Orion combo and planted a factory.

-Performed an Orbital Bombardment Weapons Test at Deimos.

-Got assigned another refinery mission out to Dione, but rolled snake eyes when crossing Saturn's rings, ending things rather prematurely.

Other cool things that came up that would have been great for an RPG session:

-En route to Dione the Germans received an additional mission to rescue a stranded Indian crew...on Dione. Didn't know if it is possible to take multiple missions if the destinations for both of them are the same, but I never got there to find out. The RPG possibilities for that encounter would have been fantastic. "We're here to rescue you. Also this is our factory now. You seem upset, why?"

-Not sure if I was doing the Earthside trends correctly, but it was generally of an increasingly gruesome flavor thanks to the Red space politics. A whole lot of Ludditism, some Surveillance State, and by the time my Germans met their unlucky fate, someone down the well had built a tomb to Fearless Leader that was visible from space. Could see having to react to a parade of such things being really interesting (especially with a crew differing strongly from Earthside trends).

-Rolling for Stresses, the Military Payload Specialist ended up with Pacifist. Lots of interesting RPG potential there, though I never encountered a combat situation.

The intuitive approach for building trends would be to go with a technology tree style structure. But I know from previous experience that tech trees are very expensive time wise to create and balance, and often feel restricting rather than enabling. So I've ended up going with a tech era system, with a random table in each era determining the trend for the era. And about midway through the era there should be a trend change which rolls 1D6 + big positive or small negative bias, instead of 2D6 + small positive or negative bias, effectively moving from a wide band of overlapping options, to a much narrower band of less overlapping and more individually likely options.

And each subsequent era has the extremes going more, well extreme. The most authoritarian regimes start out merely performing Great Projects. They then move to being Big Brothers or Failed States, and then Homeward Hive or Forever Wars. And where they can end up? Well let's just say aggressive Grey Goo Berserker starships consuming everything in their path is only the second worst option.

Thursday, 15 September 2016

Every vote for the 2013 Ascii Dreams Roguelike of the Year poll is below. As for why I stopped? I kind of forgot about doing it the next year. Which is probably an indication that it stopped being fun to do. I wish someone a little more active in the community had picked up the idea and run with it, but apparently it wasn't important enough for someone else to feel the need to do so.